For the past few years, Jeff Kauf­man has led Google Cam­bridge’s EAs in suc­cess­fully lob­by­ing to di­rect that money to­ward GiveWell-recom­mended char­i­ties. At be­tween a quar­ter-mil­lion and a half-mil­lion dol­lars each year, this may be the largest fundrais­ing event for GiveWell char­i­ties in the world.

This is worded cor­rectly but is a bit hard to in­ter­pret: I don’t or­ga­nize the fundraiser, I help or­ga­nize the EA par­ti­ci­pa­tion in it. Over­all it looks like:

Each year, for the week of Giv­ing Tues­day, there’s a com­pany wide sys­tem of fundrais­ing for char­i­ties.

I co­or­di­nate EAs across the com­pany in find­ing other EAs with com­pat­i­ble in­ter­ests in their lo­ca­tion/​busi­ness unit and send out re­minders about dead­lines.

In the Cam­bridge office we have a bake-off where em­ploy­ees bake, spon­sors put in some amount per good baked, other em­ploy­ees donate in or­der to taste them, and an­other set of spon­sors matches these dona­tions. The more you donate the more votes you get. This is the fundraiser the post talks about.

The bake-off or­ga­niz­ers are peo­ple who think highly of GiveWell, partly re­lated to the ad­vo­cacy of Bos­ton EAs, but I think don’t iden­tify as EAs them­selves. They make the de­ci­sion about what char­i­ties the bake-off should fea­ture, and have cho­sen GiveWell top char­i­ties for the past sev­eral years.

The bake-off is built around match­ing and spon­sor­ship, es­pe­cially that the dona­tions peo­ple make to eat/​vote are matched. That match­ing has been pro­vided by Google Cam­bridge’s EAs, and one fac­tor in the bake-off or­ga­niz­ers choos­ing GiveWell char­i­ties is that we’ve been able to provide a large match pool.

It’s not clear how coun­ter­fac­tual any of this is. Each year when I pub­li­cize it in­ter­nally part of what I talk about is that my match isn’t coun­ter­fac­tu­ally valid, and I’ll be donat­ing my share whether or not oth­ers also donate. I use it as a time to talk about why you shouldn’t ex­pect matches like this to be coun­ter­fac­tual, and pre­sent it as “please join us in fund­ing” and not “you can un­lock ex­tra fund­ing”.

FB had a limit of $20k/​donor this year, and I think that’s much more likely to go down than up. So de­pend­ing how much you’re donat­ing there’s not much rea­son to save more than than for Giv­ing Tues­day.

There’s also the 1% PayPal match (plus 2% cash back) that’s been in De­cem­ber each year. At a 16%/​year dis­count rate it’s worth wait­ing a cou­ple months for that 3% but not all year.

“Trump signed a good law this week. Yes, re­ally.” pre­sents con­flict: here’s a per­son who you usu­ally ex­pect to be do­ing harm­ful things, and here they are do­ing some­thing good. It can’t make that hook with­out as­sum­ing some­thing about their read­ers, and the hook draws peo­ple’s in­ter­est. It’s not an “un­nec­es­sary jibe”; it’s the sort of thing that draws far more in­ter­est than a head­line like “Trump signed a good law about HIV this week.”

It’s not a trade­off I would make in my writ­ing, but Vox is a left-lean­ing out­let and it seems pretty rea­son­able to me for them to write for a left-lean­ing crowd.

A site that brings in money by show­ing ads gen­er­ally makes un­der $10 per 1000 vis­its (CPM) so at most $0.01 per visit. Even if we make un­re­al­is­ti­cally pos­i­tive as­sump­tions (they’re get­ting very high CPMs, they donate 100% of the money, the money goes to char­i­ties that are as valuable as the AMF) then $10 to the AMF does as much good as vis­it­ing the Hunger Site daily for three years. With the same un­re­al­is­ti­cally pos­i­tive as­sump­tions, if this takes you 10s each time then you’re work­ing for un­der $3.60/​hr.

So I think this is prob­a­bly not worth look­ing into fur­ther. Vol­un­teer­ing to look at ads just doesn’t bring in that much money so even if you got the best pos­si­ble an­swers to your ques­tions it wouldn’t make sense.

(Similarly, I don’t think try­ing to clone a site like this and run it tar­geted at GiveWell top char­i­ties would be worth it ei­ther.)

My not-that-in­formed view is some­thing like “there are a bunch of prob­lems with ACE, but I’m not sure there’s any­one bet­ter right now”. But if you have peo­ple in mind who would have been bet­ter for this role that would be re­ally helpful to know!

You can ex­tend your ar­gu­ment to even smaller prob­a­bil­ities: how much effort should go into this if we think the chance is 0.1%? 0.01? Or in the other di­rec­tion, 50%, 90%, etc. In ex­tremes it’s very clear that this should af­fect how much fo­cus we put into avert­ing it, and I don’t think there’s any­thing spe­cial about 1% vs 10% in this re­gard.

Another way of think­ing about it is that AI is not the only ex­is­ten­tial risk. If your es­ti­mate for AI is 1% in the next ten years but pan­demics is 10%, vs 10% for AI and 1% for pan­demics, then that should also af­fect where you think peo­ple should fo­cus.

I’m as­sum­ing that the coun­ter­fac­tual here is some­one who wants to do un­paid di­rect work full time, has some funds available that could be used to ei­ther sup­port them­selves or could be donated to some­thing high im­pact, and could ei­ther live in SF or Black­pool.

Is this the coun­ter­fac­tual for the ho­tel man­ager, or for a res­i­dent? I’m only try­ing to ad­dress the ho­tel man­ager role here, but I wouldn’t ex­pect the coun­ter­fac­tual for a ho­tel man­ager to be un­paid di­rect work.

I think the value of hav­ing a very tal­ented full-time man­ager for your group house is not about re­duc­ing ex­penses, it’s about cre­at­ing a house cul­ture that serves to mul­ti­ply the im­pact of all the residents

This makes a lot of sense to me, but read­ing the Ho­tel Man­ager sec­tion the im­pres­sion I get is that a ho­tel man­ager would be too busy to do much in that di­rec­tion. There’s no dis­cus­sion of their role in set­ting cul­ture, and a lot of op­er­a­tions work.

Th­ese chores don’t go away if you live in an ex­pen­sive hous­ing mar­ket or make a high in­come.

If you have a high in­come, though, you can pay other peo­ple to do them: for ex­am­ple, in­stead of cook­ing you could buy frozen food, buy restau­rant food, or hire a cook.

I ex­pect that these economies of scale effects will be­come even more valuable as the num­ber of peo­ple in the ho­tel grows.

My ex­pe­rience with cook­ing is that above about 6-10 peo­ple the economies of scale drop off a lot. I re­ally like liv­ing in a house with enough adults that I can cook about once a week, but as the num­ber of peo­ple (and com­bi­na­tions of dietary re­stric­tions) grows you get be­yond what one per­son can cook eas­ily.

Over­all, though, it sounds like you’re more ar­gu­ing for “group houses are great” (which I agree on) and not “tak­ing the ho­tel man­ager job has high coun­ter­fac­tual im­pact” (which I think is much more im­por­tant?)

Paradigm Academy was in­cu­bated by Lev­er­age Re­search, as many or­ga­ni­za­tions in and around EA are by oth­ers (e.g., MIRI in­cu­bated CFAR; CEA in­cu­bated ACE, etc.). As far as I can tell now, like with those other or­ga­ni­za­tions, Paradigm and Lev­er­age should be viewed as two dis­tinct or­ga­ni­za­tions.

See Ge­off’s re­ply to me above: Paradigm and Lev­er­age will at some point be sep­a­rate, but right now they’re closely re­lated (both un­der Ge­off etc). I don’t think view­ing them as sep­a­rate or­ga­ni­za­tions, where learn­ing some­thing about Lev­er­age should not much af­fect your view of Paradigm, makes sense, at least not yet.